The Uncomfortable TruthYou’ve spent days prompt-engineering your LLM. You’ve benchmarked Claude against GPT. You’ve debated whether to use Mixtral. But your RAG pipeline is still returning garbage answers, and you’re blaming the wrong component. The LLM is only as good as the context it receives. Context quality is entirely determined by retrieval. Retrieval quality is entirely determined by your embedding model. Fix the bottom, and the top fixes itself.